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Like many other people I was married in June. Why is June a popular month for weddings? One website says it’s because according to the Celtic calendar, couples started courting on Cross-Quarter Day of Beltane and were supposed to get married on the next Cross-Quarter Day, August 1. Turns out they couldn’t wait and would get married in June. Other website theories are 1- because it honors Juno, the Roman goddess of marriage, 2 – because the soon-to-be pregnant wife could still help during harvest and a child would be born in the spring, 3 – due to the fact May was “bath month”.

For whatever reason it was the tradition stuck and I have been seeing #ThrowbackThursday photos of friends’ weddings all month. This year was my tenth anniversary. I really wanted to post photos of my wedding to Facebook and Instagram but realized my pictures were all on film and I hadn’t had many of them scanned since then.

I knew just what to do. I went to the Kodak Picture Kiosk in our office and used the Kodak Rapid Print Scanner to scan in prints that I took out of our wedding album.

After I scanned in my photos I was able to save them to a CD using Kodak Picture Kiosk. Now I had them in a digital format so I could post them to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

While I had them on the Kiosk I could have also made extra prints, cards, calendars and more.

This is a great thing to be aware of if you like doing projects with photos. I have nearly fainted in the past when discovering someone has cut up an original 20 to 50 year old photo for scrapbooking, crafting or displaying. Especially if you do not have the negative DON’T CUT UP YOUR OLD PHOTOS! Visit a Kodak Picture Kiosk and make copies!

Here are some of my favorite photo projects for weddings, showers, honeymoons and anniversaries that you can use those special photos for!

Don’t forget, when it comes to photography and weddings you always want to hire a professional photographer so you know that all those special moments will be captured. You won’t regret it years later.

This time of year you might start to feel some twinges of spring fever. You might feel like doing some spring cleaning or changing up your home decor. Decorating with photos is an easy and beautiful way to refesh your home.

Turns out, some experts say that looking at photos can have a positive effect.

Woman’s Day recommends that you put photos on the fridge to improve your mood in five minutes. They point out that we look at our refigerator 27 times a day, so it’s a good opportunity to look at something that makes you happy. “Research shows that the happiest people have many joyful family photos displayed in their homes,” says Caroline Adams Miller, coauthor of Creating Your Best Life.

This Yahoo article “How to Cheer Up: 5 Proven Mood-Enhancing Things to Do Right Now” also recommends photos as a way to feel better. UK’s The Open University showed in a study that looking at your personal photos is a better mood enhancer than other traditional activities like eating chocolate, drinking wine or listening to music. They suggest keeping photos in plain sight and occasionally switching them up is a great way to improve your mood.

Twitter and Facebook has been full of posts about New Year’s resolutions. I was reading a friend’s blog post about goals for 2014 and noticed that “Take more pictures and do something with them” was on the list.

It might seem like we are taking more photos than ever with our mobile phone cameras always on hand along with Instagram and Facebook making it super easy to share them. But what do we do with all those photos?

At the beginning of the New Year I looked back over a lot of pictures from 2013 to write a recap post on my blog, make slideshows to post to Facebook and see how I did on my New Year’s goals. I think everyone would agree it’s a lot of fun to look at pictures whether they are from the past year or twenty years ago.

Do you have lots of photos that are buried on your hard drive? Trapped on your mobile phone? Why not set them free where you can enjoy them every day?

Display Your Pictures

What better way to enjoy your photos than to put them on display in your home where you can see them all the time? There are so many options. Perhaps a formal wall arrangement where you can match the frames and photos or maybe create an eclectic arrangement.

You don’t have to go with typical frames in a wall presentation. Try something like placing photos in an old window frame, tying them to a tree branch in a vase or clipping them to a wire strung across two nails. Not only is it a fun way to display photos but it makes it super easy to swap the photos out and refresh them each season or holiday.

Shoeboxes filled with photos have been replaced by computer folders full of jpegs. There really is no substitute for flipping through a real physical album of photos. You can tell a story with your photos and captions in a photo book and then it’s there on your book shelf or coffee table ready to relive at any moment.

Your stories don’t have to be grand adventures either. It’s not just vacations and weddings that can be recorded in a photo book. Something as simple as the season for your garden or your child’s baseball team can make a great subject for a photo book.

A really easy and quick way to tell a story with your photos is with a collage. There are so many ways you can enjoy a collage print of a collection of photos from a party, outing or just an afternoon outside. Hang it on your fridge or brighten a wall at the office.

Use Your Pictures

Put your pictures to work and then you get to appreciate them every time you use them. Like with these photo bottle cap magnets. Bills and reminders are so much more pleasant when they are being held up by a smiling family member’s photo.

Do you stand in the card aisle looking for just the right card with just the right message? Why not make your own? Nothing is more personal than a photo card with your OWN picture and message. Not only for Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day but consider using your photos for thank you cards, invitations and congratulations.

Don’t forget about giving photos as gifts. Whether it’s a photo book or a framed print, it’s a gift your friends and family will love and look at for years to come.

Like this:

Did you know that the day after Halloween is one of the biggest photo sharing days of the year on Facebook? So we know you are taking lots of pictures on Halloween. Here are some ideas for using them!

A pack of plastic spiders, a glue gun and a plain picture frame is all you need to make a creepy, crawly display for your favorite photos.

Those spiders can also be glued to clothespins painted black and go on to have many uses.

They can hold photos and stand alone…

Or be clipped to a string for a festive Halloween photo banner.

Fill a jar with water, red food coloring and some plastic eyeballs for a really gross Halloween photo display. Yes! You can submerge prints from Kodak Picture Kiosk into water and they will last! “Prints made at our self-service kiosks are also waterproof and stain resistant. They are protected with KODAK XTRALIFE Coating that makes them incredibly durable—they are even wipeable!” – thus being able to add them to a jar of water.

When I went to Hawaii last summer I took hundreds of photos. Some were on my DSLR, some on Kodak film and some on my iPhone.

The pictures taken with my DSLR and film camera were blown up, printed, framed and made into photo books.

The pictures taken on my iPhone were posted to Facebook and that was the last anyone saw of them. I recently went back to my Facebook album and realized there were shots I got with my iPhone, because it was handy, that I didn’t otherwise capture.

Not wanting to forget those moments, I used the My Kodak Moments app for Facebook to make Social Prints of those shots. As you can see above I have ordered prints of my Facebook photos using the My Kodak Moments app before… it works really well with square photos like those that come from Instagram.

You can access all your photo albums on Facebook to choose your photos. If your friends have given you permission, you can even print photos from their albums.

There are several alternatives to choose from for your prints. You can change the background color/pattern and the orientation.

You can even do a “mini-collage” print with three photos.

Lots of combos to choose from!

The app pulls in any comments that were posted to that photo onto your print. If you want to edit it or delete it just click “Edit Caption”

I wanted a fun way to display these prints at home so I took an old frame and converted it into a photo display that I can easily update occasionally.

It was pretty easy. I took out the glass and wrapped the board inside the frame with an old map. I thought the map would make a nice background for travel photos.

Then I nailed small nails into the back of the frame, stretched wire across the front of the frame and wrapped it around the nails.

I like to use little wee clothespins to attach the prints to the wire. They are so cute. You can also hang other memorabilia with the pictures like postcards, business cards, tickets and menus.

Recently, a friend of mine walked by a luxury boutique in New York City. In the front window was a large display of a super model/TV personality. She related to me the following: “I don’t remember which model and I don’t remember what she was modeling. What I remember is the large two-foot blotch on the upper edge of the print. Not the highly paid model. Not the luxury item for sale. Not, to think of it, the brand selling it.“

Paco Underhill, one of the industry’s foremost experts on retailing and founder of Envirosell, said “Today, the photograph in retail is everywhere—silk-screened images in windows, lifestyle graphics in the aisles, flat screens mounted from ceilings, projections on the floor, and the incorporation of images onto packaging. The creative drive has been focused on making good stuff look great.” http://click.si.edu/Story.aspx?story=787

Make good stuff look great. When I heard the story above about what should have been a gorgeous display instead tainted by the quality of the media on which it’s printed, I’m even more committed to what we’re doing at Kodak. In recent years, lower quality display materials have entered the market, and as marketing budgets have shrunk, some brands saw using these “good enough” materials as a viable cost-saving alternative. “Good enough” does not create great. And in this case, it created just the opposite.

We recently introduced our new KODAK PROFESSIONAL ENDURA Transparency Display Media to the market, based on the fundamental belief that our customers in this space require media that creates the most visually effective output – for large displays (such as trade-show stands and booths), in-store point-of-purchase materials, and indoor transit displays (airports, subways).

Our labs partners and specifiers use Kodak Display media for some of the world’s most well-known brands because they know that no matter where in the world an image is printed, our media ensures consistency and the preservation of the quality those brands represent. Dominick Dunne, COO of Splash Worldwide, a technology based communications agency, said this when asked why he recommends Kodak media to his clients.

We recommend Kodak media because it is the most consistent and has the highest quality. In most offset printing applications, there are industry specifications that enable Splash to show a digital proof and know that no matter what press they will print on the printer can match the proof. The best examples of this are SWOP and GRACOL. No specifications exist in the out-of-home or in-store production business. By standardizing on Kodak media, Splash has created a de-facto standard.

In an era where competition for consumer attention and ultimately dollars is fierce, we want to make sure that our customers have the best output to contribute to their success. That means consistency. It means reliability. It means high quality. Our R&D continues in photographic paper because to succeed in a competitive market, our customers deserve, and frankly, need more than “good enough.”